May 2006 marks the centenary of the death of Michael Davitt,
nationalist, trade unionist, agrarian agitator and founder of the
National Land League.

Michael Davitt was born in 1846, at the beginning of the most terrible
years of famine, to an impoverished Mayo family, who were evicted from
their home in 1852. They emigrated to Lancashire where Davitt obtained
an education from his parents but also from the Protestant and
Dissenting churches competing for followers in the local working class
communities. It is perhaps from this experience that Davitt formed his
life-long opposition to any form of religious sectarianism.

At the age of 11 Davitt went to work in a cotton mill. The Victorian
cotton mills of Lancashire are now notorious for the callous
indifference with which they used up the lives and limbs of their child
workers. Within a year of starting work Davitt was a victim of the
non-stop machinery, with his right arm being trapped and crushed. It
was amputated near the shoulder. Determinedly he taught himself to
write again, now with his left hand.

Davitt’s disability did not prevent him throwing himself wholeheartedly
into political life. For someone without any formal schooling Davitt
developed an astonishing skill with the written word, especially
evident in his political writings. He joined the Fenians and
participated in the 1867 Rising. By 1870 he was a key organiser of the
scattered rebel movement but infiltration by British Intelligence led
to his being arrested. Prison at that time was an ordeal designed to
shatter body and spirit. Davitt was put to hard tasks, such as
stone-breaking one-handed with a pick, or being strapped into a harness
in order to haul a cart. Only after the harness wore away his shoulder
stump did the prison authorities relent to the extent of making him
instead pound rotten bones into manure.

The desperate conditions faced by Davitt were drawn attention to in
Westminster and in 1877 he was paroled, on condition of good behaviour.
Davitt soon recovered from his prison years and proved he was far from
being broken. He emerged determined to implement a new course of action
that embodied two fundamental organising principles: that political
action had to be open and gain a popular following and that the way to
stir the people of Ireland was to organise around the question that
most materially affected their lives, which in the 1870’s and 1880’s
was the question of tenant rights to land.

Davitt was the first IRB member to conduct open political rallies
and his new approach was supported by John Devoy in America. These two
Fenians then sought for allies in the political elite of the national
movement and found one in Parnell. The Land League was born of a fusion
of two political traditions, those physical force nationalists willing
to abandon conspiracy in favour of building a mass movement and those
parliamentarians willing to sanction popular demonstrations and
activity for the sake of revitalising support for Home Rule. Both wings
had to face criticism from within their own ranks, but while the
alliance lasted it was phenomenally successful. Massive rallies took
place across Ireland in 1879 and 1880, laying the basis for action.
Landlords were to be stopped from making evictions by a tactic so
successful that its implementation, first of all against Captain
Boycott, gave a new term to the world. Landlords who attempted
evictions were now met with a complete embargo. In Captain Boycott’s
case he could get no one to work for him, no labourer, coachman,
servant, stableman. No shopkeeper would serve him, even the twelve year
old post boy would not deliver his mail. Although Boycott became a
cause celebre for loyalists, who raised funds and voluntary labour for
him, Boycott was defeated by these means and left Ireland.

Michael Davitt was at the heart of the Land League, its tireless
organiser. This was his greatest moment. The British Government’s
response was to break the movement with the carrot and the stick,
arresting Davitt in 1881 and imprisoning him without trial on the
grounds of breach of his release conditions. A thousand other activists
soon followed Davitt to jail, but at the same time a Land Act made
considerable concessions to the demands of the movement.

Protest at Davitt’s arrest was massive, including tens of thousands
marching in London, from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square. In Parliament
itself Parnell and his followers were expelled for their disruption to
proceedings. But here the movement faltered and divided along its main
fault line. Davitt urged the immediate calling of a complete rent
strike across Ireland. At that moment such an act would have been
immensely popular. The Irish parliamentarians hesitated, met together,
and then came back to Westminster to make hot-tempered speeches to the
kind of audience they were comfortable with. The alternative, to lead a
truly huge mass campaign, frightened them. Their surrender of the
initiative was an exact repetition of O’Connell’s cancellation of the
1843 rally at Clontarf.

By the time of Davitt’s release the energy had gone from the Land
League, the reforms on offer being sufficient to fragment the
enthusiasm of the tenant farmers as, piecemeal, they sought to obtain
what they could from the new legislation. Davitt himself, however, was
still hugely respected as a champion of the tenant farmer and Mayo
returned him to Parliament in 1892.

It was in his second period of imprisonment that Davitt formulated the
goal of nationalisation of the land. In theory, he argued, it should be
done without compensation for the landlords, not even the cost of their
ferry ticket to Holyhead. In practice it could be done by government
purchase of the land, at a cost of #140 million, which while an immense
sum, could be gradually repaid by a ten percent land tax; a tax which
would leave the tenant paying only half the rents they were currently
paying but with the security of knowing they now owned the land and
therefore the incentive to improve it.

This idea was eminently practical but philosophically alien to both
Irish and British politicians, committed as they were to private
property. Davitt’s supporters in this idea were not to be found in
Westminster but in the emerging socialist movement in Britain, so whom
he now associated himself. Nor did political games among the British
elite suit a man who had grown up in the harshest of conditions and who
had built a movement that had awoken a country. Davitt resigned his
seat in 1896 telling Parliament that `no just cause can succeed here
unless backed by physical force.’ Until his death in 1906 he remained
an ally of the Irish poor and British trade unions, although he did not
live long enough to appreciate the revolutionary significance of the
emerging Irish urban working class movement.

James Connolly summed up his view of the power of Davitt’s movement
when he wrote that `the strength and power of the political agitation
of the Land League lay in the fact that its representatives were the
servants and mouthpieces of a class who were already organised and
holding the means of production with a revolutionary intent. They were
not asking government to give them possession, they were already in
defiant possession and demanding that such possession be legalised.
Their base of operation was secondarily at the election booth,
primarily on the farm.’